When Did People Start Mooning Each Other?

Mooning: A History

After the clumsy suitor Wee Dingwall strikes a surprising bull’s-eye in the new Pixar movie Brave, his father gloats over the victory in an unusual but familiar way: He puts his back to his enemies and lifts up his kilt. In Braveheart, another movie set in Scotland during the Middle Ages—Braveheart is set in the 13th century, while Brave is set in the 10th or 11th century—hundreds of Scottish warriors moon their British enemies from across the battlefield. Did Europeans really moon each other in the Middle Ages?

If the gesture was employed on the battlefield between the English and Scots, as in Braveheart, the mooning may have been taken place the other way around. The University of York professor Nicola McDonald points out that, according to the chronicle of the 13th century historian Peter Langtoft, it was the English who used mooning to insult the Scots.

By the early 1500s, mooning had come to the Americas. On his explorations of the Atlantic coast of North America, the Italian explorer Giovannia da Verrazzano was mooned by the cagey Abenaki tribe of Maine, who after a trade of goods began “showing their buttocks and laughing.” In his acclaimed book 1491, the journalist Charles C. Mann uses the encounter to suggest that the Abenaki had been burned by Europeans before.

Though it was a worldwide phenomenon by the 19th century, mooning didn’t get its name until the 1960s. The Oxford English Dictionary dates moon and mooning to student slang of the 1960s, when the gesture became increasingly popular at American universities. The term derives from the use of moon or moons as slang for the bare buttocks, a usage that dates back as far as the 18th century. The OED says that in 1756 one author declared of another man’s butt that “his Moon shall never be covered by me or Buck.” (The dictionary also notes that in James Joyce’s UlyssesLeopold Bloom imagines women with “their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon.”) One of the first descriptions of mooning comes from a 1963 issue of the American magazine Look, which described “a game called mooning.”Accordingto the magazine,said game “originated about two years ago in southern California.” Of course, by 1963 the gesture was much older than that.

Thanks to David Levenson of Florida State University, Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com.

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